


Don't Say It's Hopeless

by NervousAsexual



Series: The Empath [3]
Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: Depression, Dysthymia, Hurt/Comfort, contains traces of actual theraputic techniques, i spent like a week in a partial psych ward and it helped so much
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-01
Updated: 2018-11-01
Packaged: 2019-08-11 01:19:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 959
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16465958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NervousAsexual/pseuds/NervousAsexual
Summary: Everything is falling apart around him, and Bones is trying to keep it together.





	Don't Say It's Hopeless

He realized eventually that Spock was speaking to him. He was lying on a biobed, his head was spinning, and Spock was speaking to him.

"You are alright, Leonard," he said. "You are alright."

And even though he could barely breathe and had two lungfuls of plant toxin... he was alright.

Chapel stabbed a hypo into his neck and he opened his eyes and looked up at Spock and at Jim, and he cried.

"Oh no," Jim said. "No, no, no." He came forward and Chapel took him firmly by the shoulders and moved him out of the way so she could have clear access to Bones. "It's gonna be okay. You'll see."

He wanted to tell Jim that he knew that, that this was ironically enough the first moment he knew it for sure, but he couldn't speak.

He didn't want to die, which was funny because he'd spent so long hoping the opposite. Hell, when the Vians were conducting their sadistic little experiment with the empath girl he'd actually been excited for it, in a way he hadn't been excited for a long time.

The part of his mind that never really went away, that voice that always spoke the loudest at night and when he was alone, that part told him, that's because you would have died a hero instead of a damn fool stumbling across a deadly form of plant life on a barely charted planet while the rest of the crew tries to stop full-scale war with the Klingons and...

No. Even though he was tired--and god was he tired--he put those thoughts back down. He didn't want to die, not because it would be meaningless, not because he wanted so much to live... but just because he could look up right now at Jim and at Spock and even through the tears he could see the pain in their eyes, and he wanted nothing else to do with that.

Jim looked so close to tears himself and he hated himself for worrying him and for taking him away from the things he should be doing... but no, he reminded that voice, he'd had no way of knowing that this would happen, he had done nothing wrong.

This was supposed to make him feel better. Hadn't at first, helped a little after months of practice, but why did it make him more tired?

Spock took his hand, and though he was still short of breath he kept crying, and Jim cried too.

What was that old chestnut? No one will love you until you love yourself? He was proof positive that was a lie.

Chapel came swooping in again and stuck him with another hypospray and as Spock traced his fingertips along his palm he gasped in a full breath of air for the first time in what felt like hours.

"There you go," Chapel said, and Jim came crashing down and hugged him tightly.

"Sorry," he managed to get out.

"Sorry? Sorry? You should be sorry. Spock, do you see what he did to me?"

Over Jim's shoulder Spock raised one eyebrow just a little. "You have made the captain cry."

"Court martial-able offense." Jim held on and didn't let go.

And now he'd live to see that court martial, he thought dryly. And war with the Klingons. And unrest in the Federation. And even more crew members who would inevitably die on his watch...

"Leonard." Spock's hand stopped moving. His voice was stern.

"'m sorry." God, he could see the endless expanse of the future in front of him now and there was nothing he could do to change it.

"No. Do not say you are sorry. You are now forbidden from apologizing."

Jim hugged him tighter.

"You may say thank you. You may not say you are sorry."

Thank you for staying with me. "Under... under what authority?"

Spock put his free hand on Jim's shoulder. "The captain's, of course."

Thank you for noticing something was wrong.

"I'll put my name to that." Jim sat back up and wiped at his eyes with the heel of one hand. "You haven't done a thing worth being sorry over, honestly. You know that, right? You know I was just kidding you?"

He put a hand on Jim's.

"He knows," Spock said.

Tell him he's being a damn fool, he thought, trying to will the message up to Spock. Spock gave him a wide-eyed look and shook his head. Fine. He'd get well enough to tell Jim his own self.

The entire ship gave a lurch, like something had struck the shields. Jim threw himself over Bones and Spock threw himself over Jim.

"Klingons," Spock said, like it wasn't obvious. Bones tried to grab at them both but he couldn't actually get his arms around them.

"Klingons," Jim agreed. "Nothing spoils a mood like Klingons. We should..."

They both looked up toward the bridge, and then back at Bones.

I'll be okay, he wanted to tell them. He didn't want them to leave, didn't want to let them out of his sight because that was inevitably when something awful happened, but they had work to do and he... he would be alright.

"Leonard." Spock put his fingers to Bones' face. "I will not leave if being alone will..."

All the adrenaline from being unable to breathe was starting to slip away. God, he was tired. He wished this were over. He wished he didn't have to do this.

But oddly enough, he didn't actually want to die.

"Ah," Spock said. "I see."

 Damn weird brain chemistry, he thought to himself as he drifted off to sleep. Didn't want to die, didn't want to live... But somebody had to look after those two.

**Author's Note:**

> This is my third year on AO3 and my third story in this series, and I feel like it's been pretty much indicative of my mental health. 2016 was a hell year and I wrote about Bones wishing he'd been killed, 2017 happened extremely fast and was filled with anxiety, so I wrote about Spock realizing something was up and trying to comfort Bones, and now 2018 has been an absolute disaster of a year and I wrote about things falling apart and wanting to stick around anyway.
> 
> Weird, right?
> 
> So basically I wrote this series about a character with the same mental health issues as me, and by the middle of this year I was having such a rough time that I checked myself into a psych ward, and that will probably go down in history as one of the best decisions I ever made. I learned a lot of stuff that I tried to put into this story, but here's the short list:
> 
> 1) Negative self-talk. It's easy for most of us. We've been doing it forever. We gotta stop. This is easier said than done, but so are most things worth doing. Obviously with so much practice you can't just turn off the negativity faucet, so what I've been trying to do is steer it in a different direction. One of my things has always been looking back at something I've done that strikes me as weird or awkward and tell myself I'm stupid and an idiot, so as soon as I'm aware that I'm doing it I immediately think of that one episode of Jonny Quest and turn it into, "You stupid fools! We're under the glacier!" and then a big chunk of ice falls on the negative talk and wipes out both it and the many small fishing villages that live along the fjord. I don't know. 
> 
> 2) Things to live for. I know the things don't have to be big--maybe you want to hang around long enough to see the next episode of your favorite TV show, maybe you want to wait to see the leaves change in the fall, maybe you're just hanging around until you can play Half-Life 3 (in which case, congrats, you are now immortal). For me, every time it got bad enough for me to want to die, I would think about a friend of mine, also struggling with depression, and realize I couldn't just abandon her. She saved my life and she's not even in the same time zone anymore. 
> 
> 3) Don't say sorry when you mean thank you. Your mere existance is not something to apologize for.
> 
> 4) Celebrate the little things. You rolled out of bed this morning? Congrats, you got up when you wanted to stay in bed. You tried to clean your bathroom and only managed to put the cap on the toothpaste before you were too tired and had to take a break? Congrats, that's more than was done before. You needed to call somebody and got their number into the phone before panicking, abandoning the phone in a closet, and fleeing to the other side of the house? No, you took the first step toward taking care of yourself.
> 
> 5) (my least favorite step) Try not to nap. I was told you should only nap for twenty minutes, starting the clock when you lay down. If you're like me and it takes you a good hour to fall asleep, this will seem unfair. It is. But the problem with naps is you then can't sleep at night, and great googly moogly do all problems seem worse at night. Sleep through the dark quiet hours; it's probably the most productive thing you can do.


End file.
